What a crazy time to be alive. It's been months of life during a pandemic and yet I almost left my house without a mask today. Given that I spent yesterday working on a Bitmoji classroom to use with virtual learning, and disassembling/rearranging furniture to create a space from which to teach in my bedroom, I don't know how I left the house without one. Thankfully the used masks on the passenger seat of the car clued me in and I ran back inside to grab a clean one before I actually left.
Two teachers at my school have been compiling a list of online resources and platforms we might want to use in our online teaching this fall. We have two extra days of PD scheduled for next week to navigate these resources in addition to the regularly scheduled three days of meetings that will be the following week. I have homework to click on several links on the shared doc and watch some videos. It's easy enough homework that will help me get more out of next week's PD, but so far I haven't been motivated to actually do it. I feel more than a little overwhelmed at all that I don't know.
My new team is amazing. They have already created an impressive amount of curricular specific docs and slides to push out to students when we begin teaching. Many of them were created prior to COVID-19 but since beginning to teach remotely last spring, they dove into the deep end and are working to simplify parent and student access as they continue to create even more docs with hyper links for students to watch videos and complete assignments. It's both awesome and anxiety provoking. I feel like I have a lot to learn about what they've created and the apps they will be directing students to use. I need to create accounts and/or figure out the teacher end of Padlet, Flipgrid, Epic, Jamboards, MobyMax, Khan Academy, and Mystery Science in addition to the platforms created by the math and ELA textbook companies whose materials the school uses.
My husband is amazing. We are in the process of clearing out an old desk with leg room and monitor viewing angle issues and replacing it with a new sit to stand desk. It's very fancy with lots of leg room and an infinitely adjustable height that will help ease neck and shoulder tension as I spend more hours in front of a computer screen than I ever believed I would each day. He even got me a huge monitor that allows me to use my laptop screen as a second monitor so I can view more windows at once. Given that I'm running two Internet browsers each with multiple tabs open on a regular basis now, having the ability to keep many windows visible at once has become invaluable. But maybe I also need to learn to close tabs I'm no longer using.
There is so much for me to learn in order to keep student engagement and learning high this fall. When I feel anxious or overwhelmed I try to take a deep breath and bring myself back to the mindset I had on the eve of my school closing in mid-March. I remember myself walking into a staff meeting after we had spent time with our grade level teachers coming up with a remote learning plan. I enthusiastically stated to the entire room of assembling teachers, "I'm learning so much!" If I can just hang onto that growth mindset, the possibilities for this fall will be limitless.
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